HOW MUJER BEGAN: NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO, ONE WOMAN’S STORY, AND A LITERACY PROGRAM (LEER ES PODER, OR READING IS POWER)

In January 2005, while driving in my car, I heard a story on National Public Radio (NPR) about a group of prostitutes (I now use the term sex workers, which is preferred by the women) at La Linea. ^{Footnote 1} About four city blocks long, La Linea is situated in downtown Guatemala City on the site of an abandoned railroad line. The women’s cramped workrooms run along both sides of the tracks. Of the several women interviewed for the NPR story, Susi, a 41-year-old woman and the mother of seven children, stated that she wanted to learn to read. For days afterward, her words danced in the back of my mind. How could Susi create a better life for herself and for her children if she could not read? What could I do about it?

When I was in graduate school, I volunteered as a literacy tutor with adults at the public library. As a result of that experience, I knew that teaching someone to read would require an extended time commitment. In 2005, when I heard the NPR story, I was still an untenured political science professor and, although I conducted research in Latin America, the idea of moving to Guatemala seemed out of the question. However, as a university professor, I realized that I had a powerful force on my side: a cohort of engaged young people who are ready to change the world. Thus, I began to consider students who might be audacious enough to spend a year in Guatemala.

I immediately thought of Ana Moraga. By then a graduating senior, Ana had been my student in her freshman year. She was born in Guatemala, had come to the United States when she was 12 years old, and was fluent in Spanish. More important than her country of origin or her language skills, I knew that Ana was a young woman who possessed a deeply held passion for women’s rights and was a leader in our campus’s social-justice community. So, in late January 2005, I asked her to drop by my office. When she came in early February, I played the NPR story for her and then asked, “Ana, if I give you $300, will you move to Guatemala, go to La Linea, find Susi, and teach her to read?” She agreed, and our literacy program, Reading is Power (Leer es Poder), was born.

The next day, I received a phone call from Ana’s roommate, Tania Torres. Tania had introduced herself to me when she was organizing a day-long community forum about violence against women in Juarez, Mexico. The forum included presentations by representatives from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government officials, the families of victims, and victim-support groups. From this experience, I knew that Tania was both a dedicated activist and a first-rate organizer. Thus, when she called to ask is she could move to Guatemala with Ana, I knew we had our team.

During the next few months, the three of us began our preparations. I was on the board of a local nonprofit and arranged to have it serve as our fiscal sponsor. Having an officially recognized NGO act as our fiscal sponsor meant that all donations to our literacy program were fully tax deductible. As for Ana and Tania, their preparations included arrangements to volunteer in Guatemala City with a French antipoverty NGO (i.e., International All Together for Dignity Fourth World). In exchange for volunteering 20 hours each week, Ana and Tania would receive free room and board, which was important because neither of them would draw a salary for their work with the literacy program. We began hosting small fundraisers to pay for their travel, and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and our university’s Jesuit Society each gave $1,000, which helped to cover Ana’s and Tania’s other expenses (e.g., bus fare and cellular phones). After graduating in May 2005, Ana and Tania moved to Guatemala in August. ^{Footnote 2}

Within days of their arrival in Guatemala City, these two intrepid young women began visiting La Linea. Two weeks later, they called me to say that they had met Susi! However, neither Susi nor any of the other women they met were interested in learning to read. Instead, they viewed Ana and Tania with skepticism; the women of La Linea doubted that they would stay long enough to teach anyone to read. Ana and Tania quickly realized that the goal of creating a literacy program at La Linea would prove to be much more difficult than the three of us had originally imagined.

Whereas others might have thrown in the towel, Ana and Tania did not give up. Instead, on their own initiative, they developed a strategy of “trust building.” Day after day, Ana and Tania visited La Linea, doing small acts of assistance. In addition to these visits, they contacted Guatemala’s national literacy program (i.e., Comité Nacional de Alfabetización [CONALFA]), which trained Ana and Tania as government-certified literacy instructors.

Slowly, as personal relationships between Ana and Tania and the women of our community developed, we began to know more about them. At any one time, about 250 women are working at La Linea. They range in age from 18 to 65 but most are older than 35. The women are mired in poverty and most survive day-to-day. About half of the women are Guatemalan; the others are migrants from neighboring Central American countries. Most speak Spanish, rather than an indigenous language, as their first language. Many are single mothers, and they often have several children. Some of the women of La Linea never received any education; others were forced to leave school at an early age. Almost all of the women we work with have been victims of sexual abuse and violence. Some of the women were trafficked (i.e., sold into prostitution), a form of modern-day slavery. The price for sex can be as little as $2.50. Each woman has a story, and the stories are often heartbreaking.

After continuing to visit La Linea for two months, Ana and Tania’s strategy paid off in October 2005: Vilma asked to be taught to read and became our first student! Gradually, other women also asked to be taught to read. The classes were free, taught by one-on-one instruction, and took place in the women’s workrooms at La Linea.

In the course of the following year (2006), Ana and Tania realized that a one-year literacy program would not be enough to make a significant difference in the lives of the women at La Linea. They determined that what was needed was an organization dedicated to empowering sex workers at La Linea, and this was the spark for MuJER. MuJER’s mission would be to provide sex workers with a belief in their own self-worth, to enable individual women to have life choices, and to allow the sex-worker community to have a voice in society. To dedicate their full efforts to MuJER, Ana and Tania left the French NGO and arranged to live in an unfurnished house that belonged to Ana’s family and that we could use as the MuJER office. By then, we had been awarded a $13,000 grant from Mama Cash, a foundation in the Netherlands, and could pay both Ana and Tania a small salary. A few months after embarking on MuJER, Ana and Tania called to tell me that Susi had asked to learn to read!

MUJER: FOUNDING AN NGO, EXPANDING OUR SERVICES, AND ESTABLISHING A COMMUNITY CENTER

In February 2007, at about the same time that I heard the wonderful news about Susi, Tania began the paperwork to establish MuJER as a US tax-exempt, or “501c3,” organization (from the section of the US Internal Revenue Code that regulates nonprofit organizations). Becoming an official 501c3 not only represented our new vision, it also allowed us to establish a bank account in MuJER’s name, thereby enabling us to receive all donations directly. It also gave us more credibility when we applied to major foundations for large grants. In September 2007, we received official notification of our 501c3 status. At this same time, Ana and Tania hired the daughter of a sex worker as MuJER’s receptionist, which deepened our positive standing in the sex-worker community.

With the establishment of our office and with the additional time that Ana and Tania could now dedicate to our work, the type of programs we offered began to expand. In addition to literacy classes, the women asked for both an accelerated elementary-school program (another CONALFA program), which is required for some vocational programs, and computer classes, which we taught with donated laptops.

Some of our new services reflected the women’s input; in other cases, the new programs reflected the needs that Ana and Tania observed in the community. In particular, they began to develop antiviolence programming. Sex workers suffer violence at the hands of clients, local gang members, police, and domestic partners. In Guatemala, these acts occur with impunity; the larger society views the women of our community as not deserving of protection. Thus, Ana and Tania began to host interactive antiviolence workshops in one of the women’s workrooms at La Linea. Furthermore, MuJER became a member of Guatemala’s Network Against Violence (Red No a la Violencia), an umbrella organization that unites associations that work to end violence against women in Guatemala. We also began to organize the women of La Linea to participate in Guatemala’s Annual Day of No Violence Against Women protest march on November 25.

With MuJER moving forward, Ana and Tania developed the next goal for MuJER: creating a Community Empowerment Center. The women’s workrooms were not conducive to teaching and it was not safe to conduct large workshops at La Linea. However, the main challenge was a lack of long-term funding because we were still operating on a very limited budget. Through Ana and Tania’s personal connections with foundations, and through my grant writing, we obtained enough funding to maintain our services, but we could not yet commit to the extra costs that a community center would entail. ^{Footnote 3}

In July 2007, Tania returned to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in nonprofit management, and Ana remained in Guatemala as MuJER’s sole executive director. I met Susi at about the same time. It was after her literacy class, in which she had just learned the letter “Q,” a wonderful experience for both of us. Tania became a member of MuJER’s board of directors, and I began to work more closely with Ana.

By early 2009, we finally felt confident enough in our funding for Ana to begin searching for a location for our Community Empowerment Center. In February, we began renting space in a colonial house in downtown Guatemala City and opened our doors. For many women of La Linea—and, over time, for sex workers from other red-light districts in Guatemala City—our Community Empowerment Center serves as a home away from home.

A STABLE SPACE: EXPANDING PROGRAMMING AT OUR COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT CENTER

Even after we opened our Community Empowerment Center and sex workers were now coming to us, we continue to conduct door-to-door visits at La Linea. These visits allow us to maintain personal relationships with the women, meet new arrivals at La Linea, and invite women to take advantage of the programs at our Center.

The Community Empowerment Center also enabled us to expand the types of vocational programs and workshops we offered. We began to provide scholarships for vocational training to women from our community, and we then hired these women to teach classes at the Center. Although our in-house vocational programs provide women with supplemental income—and, in a few cases, enabled them to leave sex work and pursue microenterprises—the most important aspect of the programs is that they bring women into our Center. We then can enroll them in literacy classes and in elementary school or invite them to join a workshop or community activity. At the Center, we also can focus more deeply on our antiviolence campaign. Workshops that were previously conducted at La Linea are now held at our Center and we can offer them more frequently.

In the summer of 2010, five and a half years after I first heard the NPR story, I received a phone call from Susi in Guatemala. By then, she was completing fourth grade in our accelerated elementary school program. Susi was excited to tell me that she had passed the reading and writing test at a vocational school and therefore had been admitted to the school’s sewing and tailoring program.

MAKING THE TRANSITION TO AN ALL-GUATEMALAN STAFF

In the fall of 2010, after four years in Guatemala, Ana decided it was time to return to the United States. We hired Flor de Maria Pena, who was previously employed in the anti-trafficking division of the Guatemalan government, as our new executive director. We currently have a four-member, all-Guatemalan staff; two of those employees are from the sex-worker community. In addition to our paid staff, MuJER continues to benefit from a cohort of dedicated volunteers and long-term international interns.

Under Flor’s leadership, MuJER’s programs have continued to evolve and expand. Our door-to-door personal visits at La Linea have been transformed into “traveling workshops,” in which we educate women about a specific topic (e.g., self-esteem, antiviolence, trafficking, and reproductive rights) for an entire month. On any given Tuesday (i.e., the day that we visit La Linea), we speak with 90 to 100 women. At the end of the month, we host a final workshop on the topic, followed by a lunch for all of the participants (which often are catered by women from the community). Today, our workshops are frequently attended by 50 or more women.

Regarding MuJER’s antiviolence campaign, Flor introduced a new program in which we accompany women through the process of filing violence complaints. In addition, MuJER continues to organize the women of La Linea to participate in the annual November 25 and March 8 antiviolence demonstrations in the capital. MuJER also has enabled sex workers to join the committee that organizes the November anti-violence demonstration, at which the women now carry a MuJER banner and wear MuJER t-shirts. In 2013 more than 50 women also marched with us in the March 8 protest.

Every January and July, before our semester-long programs begin, we visit different red-light districts to invite women to enroll in our classes at our Community Empowerment Center. Last January, we invited sex workers from nine different red-light districts in Guatemala City. This year, our classes were overflowing ^{Footnote 4} and our workshops were standing-room-only. Thus, to accommodate our growing population of daily visitors, in April 2013 we moved into a larger building, only a few blocks from our original location. Our goals for 2014 include creating a sex-worker leadership council, providing mental-health services at our Center, working with the daughters of sex workers, and establishing ourselves as a legal entity in Guatemala.

STARTING AN NGO IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD: A HOW-TO GUIDE BASED ON MUJER

In this section, I lay out advice for professors who seek to work with their students to address a particular issue in another country.